Lighthouse

  While reading up on 1944's Dead of night, I discovered there's at least two other movies with the title. One is Bob Clark's excellent Deathdream, the other one is a 1999 British indie horror movie better known as Lighthouse which various people seem to defend online. The trailers looked terrible and it didn't get good reviews, but it's got to have something interesting for it to become borderline culty, right?

 Well... no. It's a derivative, clumsy, and pretty dumb piece of crap. But then again, it does get memorably bad at points. Maybe that's what people like about it.

 The black and white prologue introduces us to Dr. Kirsty McCloud (Rachel Shelley), overacting her heart out with all the solemnity of a B-movie actor playing a Very Serious Role, while the camera dramatically zooms into her face with a whoosh and cuts to her typing, news clipping, and footage of bloody crime scenes. She's muttering some vague platitudes about evil as she writes a report about a dangerous serial killer entitled A MIND OF EVIL. LEO ROOK? Which, I have to say, made me laugh - Guess I'm easily amused.

 So that's the level of scriptwriting we're working with here. The filmmaking is kind of ambitious, including a dissolve from desk lamp to a lantern and a tracking shot as a police team examine one of Leo Rooks?'s (mind of) evil lair, but sadly it's full of visual clichés and tacky shots. Not poorly made, exactly, but it's also pretty far from actually good. TV movie level craftsmanship, though it at least shows some ambition.

 So we know we're in trouble before the credits even come on. The story concerns a police transport boat running a few criminals over to wherever. The cargo includes, of course, the mind of evil himself, Leo Rook? (Christopher Adamson), who soon breaks free and steals a boat. He reaches the nearby Gehenna Island (appropriately named; it's about as hospitable as LV-426), kills off all the lighthouse keepers, and breaks the lighthouse light just in time so that the boat he escaped from crashes into the coastline.
 If you're thinking "wait a minute, how could the timing for that possibly work out?", well... that's not the last time the script fucks up. Not even close.

 The shipwreck survivors, which include Dr. McCloud, a few cops, and a few criminals, band together and start getting hunted by Leo Rook?. It's not a bad slasher movie setup! But unfortunately, this is not a good slasher movie.
 Its main crime is badly mishandling the amount of suspense buildup any given scene needs, resulting in way scenes of the killer shambling, zombie-like, towards a victim that last for way too long, or letting people argue for a hilarious amount of time, so they don't hear someone banging at the door to be let in before he's murdered. Any accumulated tension quickly turns into unwitting comedy.
 There's a worthwhile scene in a bathroom which sets up a few moving pieces and then knocks them down, domino-like. It's really really dumb, but at least there's a sense that it's meant to be somewhat tongue in cheek. The same goes for the finale, which goes above and beyond in the amount of death dealt to Leo Rook? - a parody of 80's action movie villain deaths.
 I shouldn't forget to mention a "creepy" dream sequence that had me in stitches. It's... well, it's fucking terrible, and as nineties as it possibly could be.

 But there's not nearly enough good/bad stuff like that to sustain an hour and a half. It's... basically, it's about on-level with the average direct-to-video release of the time, which means it's kind of fucking dire, even as its general technical competence and some flourishes make me want to rate it a bit higher. Then I remember all the dumb shit you need to wade through, all the mediocrity, how generic it feels, and any goodwill drains away.

 The acting is pretty bad, though given the material, I wouldn't blame any of the actors. It's got an early role for James Purefoy playing a generic heroic hunky inmate, and I especially liked Paul Brooke as a melancholy old drunkard. His easy camaraderie with Dr. McCloud was much better than the chemistry between the two principals.
 The visual effects are... well, they're OK for the budget level and time it was made, but they still look pretty bad. The all-practical gore fares a little bit better, but it's mostly arterial spurts, and there's only so much you can do with those. Given the film's originality quotient, you bet some blood's going to get splashed on a bare lightbulb at one point, bathing a room in red light.

 The photography is ok - it manages some atmosphere at times, though the illumination for the scenes is highly variable from shot to shot. I'm much less enthused by cinematography, which is full of Dutch angles and lousy-looking slow motion; It feels like everyone involved was very enthusiastic, but unfortunately, it hews to then-current trends and the execution remains pretty bad. Entertainingly bad, sometimes, but still bad. 

 Director Simon Hunter would later go on to direct Mutant Chronicles, a green screen/CGI fest that nonetheless managed to be a lot more fun than this. It was similarly derivative, but if I'm not misremembering, it wedded war movie clichés to an obscure, Warhammer 40k-ish RPG sci-fi setting and it let Ron Perlman and Tom Jane run amok.
 It's an easy recommendation over this one; Lighthouse is a movie that honestly deserves its relative obscurity.